Millennial-Style Learning: Search Intensity, Decision Making, and Information Sharing

The growing use of online educational content and related video services has changed the way people access education, share knowledge, and possibly make life decisions. In this paper, we characterize how video content affects individual decision making and willingness to share in the context of a personal financial decision. We find that distracting advertising curtails the time people invest in searching for the best alternative and causes worse decisions. Content geared toward giving better instructions helps to overcome this effect. Such actionable content improves both search quality and financial decisions. However, including such content may decrease sharing unless it is perceived to be sufficiently useful. As such, there is a potential risk to adding actionable content to videos. Our work has important implications for policies guiding financial literacy training, and it also has broader impact for education in the information age.

Data are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2016.2689.

This paper was accepted by Amit Seru, finance.